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Mapping Georgian Celebrity

Want to know who’s who in the new Ashmolean exhibition of caricatures by James Gillray?

The subjects of Gillray’s satires often came from a small group of the (mostly) rich and famous in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As a rule, everybody in this group knew everybody else: they were linked by a complex web of family ties, marriages, love affairs, alliances, favours, hostilities, and rivalries. These became the subject of gossip, newspaper stories – and caricature. Students and academics at the University of Oxford and beyond have been working on a project tracing these connections, some of which appear in this online map of Georgian celebrity (http://www.ashmolean.org/exhibitions/lovebites/mgc/).

Click on a relationship to see who was whose boss, who hated who, who was having an affair, and all the other links between the figures in the cartoons. To find out more about each person, click on their faces for more information, pictures, and links to other resources.